Symantec employees 21,500people, it says, so that would be about 8% of its workforce.

Executives have been talking about a big restructuring for months. About a year ago, the company fired its CEO, Enrique Salem, and replaced him with chairman Steve Bennett, who had previously been CEO of Intuit.

In January, Bennett outlined an ambitious turnaround plan and warned that a layoffs were coming "I think our system is just broken," he told Wall Street analysts in January, on the first quarterly earnings call under his watch. His fix-it plan included reworking the sales team, trimming software products/reorganizing business units, cutting headcount and increasing R&D.

He said that headcount was being jacked up "by temporary employees and contract employees, and there's all sorts of games that companies can play to keep employees off the books." He then promised that big cost reduction cuts were coming ("200 basis points of margin improvement") and noted that "people-related costs are 70% of our costs."

Ergo, a big layoff was coming soon.

About 1,000 jobs are being cut this month, beginning this week and another 700 positions are to scheduled to be cut in July, Hesseldahl reports.

UDATED We reached out to Symantec for comment. A spokesperson told us:

"Symantec is in the midst of a company-wide transformation. As part of this effort, we are engaged in a company-wide reorganization. As a result, some positions are being eliminated. This action is a reflection of our new strategy and organizational simplification initiative announced by Symantec’s executives on Jan. 23rd, 2013. One of the goals of Symantec’s reorganizational effort is to make the company’s employee reporting structure more efficient and support the company strategy moving forward. We have no additional details to provide at this time.

"There are several stages to the reorganization process, as we define executive and management layers down to all levels of employees. Some notifications are happening this month, as part of this the process. We are communicating with employees directly and do not have information to share at the point in time.

"The number of impacted employees being reported is pure speculation.

"As our CEO Steve Bennett publicly stated during our March earnings call, we are not solving for a number but for the tasks in accordance with our new strategy. We are still in the process of designing the organization and notifying impacted employees, so we cannot share the total number of impacted or remaining employees."